Also, please explain how a humble laser cutter became “the ultimate hipster CNC fabricator”? Does it apply even to the cheapo noname Chinese K40 clones, or only to the manually assembled artisanal ones or the higher-class Epilog and other brands?

OpenSCAD is a good tool for designing parts. It can export DXF files for controlling of a laser cutter. The affordable ones come with a proprietary controller board that’s a crude hack with a USB-to-parallel converter that was apparently a crude way to address the demise of parallel ports. The software is an abomination called MoshiDraw, and its DXF processing capabilities are not stellar. OpenSCAD is exporting everything as individual LINE objects, MoshiDraw rearranges the cutting order in a ra…